Hello Doctor? Can I get some more happy pills?

When I was 20, I decided to move to South Lake Tahoe for a prolonged summer. One especially hot summer night I was antsy to get home quickly and didn’t come to a complete stop at the stop sign. To my luck, there was a cop waiting for me to witness this mistake, and once I was pulled over I metamorphosed into a full blown meltdown. I’ve been told I ugly cry, and you better believe that this wasn’t pretty. Once I arrived home, my ugly turned up a notch into a complete pathetic mess. I wrapped myself with a blanket like a taco, and laid in fetal position in front of the patio. My reasoning for laying in front of the patio door, was so I could try and smoke a cigarette inside while blowing the smoke out. All the while accompanying my pathetic self with a shot of whiskey.

During this hot mess, I just couldn’t seem to reasonably process the situation. Thoughts such as “What’s the point?” and “I can’t continue on” were racing through my mind. I felt as if I had no energy to continue and deep down I knew these thoughts were far to extreme of a response for a $300 ticket.

It wasn’t for another couple months that it became evident I needed to change something. So I grabbed my insurance card, called the back and explained I was looking for a psychiatrist. My insurance at the time was Kaiser, so they recommended a couple doctors to me and after reviewing them online, I made my initial “interview” appointment. I got lucky with this doctor, because she started me on some meds that worked wonders for me. My energy and motivation dramatically increased, I slept better, I lost weight and more importantly mentally felt a lot lighter. Essentially it was the push I needed to get my life back on track and start processing some things.

Now almost 5 years later, I decided it was time to wean off of them. So in August, 2017 I decided to tamper off of them. I’ll be honest, it wasn’t easy, plus I’ve been going through some serious transformation. Nonetheless, it was time to take off the training wheels.

In my opinion, antidepressants should always be accompanied with therapy. Therapy should be able to give you some insight on your thoughts and feelings and help you create a better self awareness. Then this self awareness can be used to create some real change. By understanding the patterns I was given the ability to transform what I was learning into some hands-on practices.

It took me a while to learn this and it’s still a daily practice. But your mind is powerful! It can change the course of your life and even those you are surrounded with. Unfortunately many don’t know that our mind is like a muscle. We exercise it by choosing our values, our beliefs and our frame of mind. Which then will show effect in our decisions and behaviors. It’s a keychain reaction. The beautiful thing is that we have the ability to dictate and construct our lives.

A couple books that helped me get started were:

The Bible (you’d be surprised)

The Perfect You by Dr. Caroline Leaf

Boundaries: When to say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of your Life by Henry Cloud

Battlefield of the Mind by Joyce Meyer

Writing about my struggles is never easy, so I hope you guys know I write this with a desire to help bring some insight and to also be relatable.